Hugh Grant says British tabloids bugged his phone and car and stole his medical records
Film Features Hugh Grant
Between FX’s documentary Framing Britney Spears and Meghan Markle’s interview with Oprah Winfrey, people are finally coming to terms with the long-term harm caused by the tabloid press and paparazzi. Celebrities are people, too—nobody deserves to be stalked and harassed. And this behavior from tabloids isn’t limited to just targeting women. As we learned on the latest episode of WTF With Marc Maron, U.K. gossip rags subjected Hugh Grant to some horrific stuff at the beginning of his career.
Maron brought up in the interview that he’d heard British tabloids were somehow worse than U.S. ones, and Grant mentioned that, funnily enough, he’d recently found out that tabloids didn’t just bug his cellphone to get access to text messages—they also bugged his landline. “For years and years they were listening, and my medical records [were stolen] and my car had bugs put in it so they knew where I was,” he said. “A lot of the guys who did this work—private investigators hired by tabloid newspapers—are now coming over to our side,” Gramt said, alluding to Hacked Off, the “campaign for a free and accountable press” he joined in the wake of the News Corp. phone hacking scandal in 2011. “They’re now so pissed off that the editors, senior executives, and owners of these newspapers have got away scot-free while some of these ‘foot soldiers’ have gone to jail. They’re now coming over to our side and spilling the beans. Apart from it being sort of fascinating and horrific, it’s also quite heartwarming and weird in a way.”
He also said he hosts a birthday party every year with Hacked Off, and the group loves to invite “people who’ve done terrible things to” Grant—like the person who snooped around his apartment after busting its door off the hinges. “So they love to say at these parties, ‘Now, Hugh, I don’t think you’ve met Knobby, he broke into your flat in 1999,’ and I have to go ‘Oh, hi Knob, welcome. I think you know where everything is.’” Good on him for having a sense of humor about it—but yikes, we probably wouldn’t be as nice.
[via The Hollywood Reporter]
33 Comments
Sigh.
I wish that someone would bug my phone.{foreveralone.jpg}
done and done 😉
Maybe if you called someone other than Domino’s once in a while.
I don’t even order. I just ask what their specials are and then burst out crying when none of them are me.
“I’d like the meal deal for two please, and a second person.”
Share my entree; and my life.
You fool, that’s an SD-6 code signal!
Be nicer to your mom, by the way. She only calls because she cares and she just wants you to meet a kind person and be happy. Last night you were particularly short with her.
Turn around.
The bug’s been behind you the Whole Time
Bugging phones is so impersonal, which is why I prefer to peer in at you through your bathroom window.
He doesn’t suspect a thing. Move to Phase 3.
Oh Modusoperandi, don’t you see? The real bugged phone was the friends you made along the way.
I woke up one morning to discover my phone had been bugged. I wish I knew this would happen when I bought it from some guy named Gregor Samsa.
I like the concept of that Hacked Off campaign, but I’d also add that it’s the culture of celebrity worship overall that is toxic to society. That dark side of celebrity worship & obsession killed Princess Diana, unveiled the Pamela Anderson sextape, created Paris Hilton and The Kardashians, encouraged the insanity of Kanye West and Elon Musk, and the worst example of all, fueled the rise of Donald Trump’s political career. Yes, these journalists and paparazzi should be help accountable. But we have to stop idolizing rich people and stop obsessing over famous people’s personal lives. Goddammit Robin Leach, what have you gotten us into?!
UK tabloids were essentially the Stasi of the celebrity world. They made The Enquirer look ethical. Quite frankly, I’m glad they got beat down. I don’t even want to think what shit they would be saying about Meghan Markle if they had the powers they had back then (quite frankly, I was surprised they didn’t go for her jugular).
‘the dudes who used to bug my phones are good now!’
i’m a dude. ur a dude. we’re all dudes now
I suspect there’s a bit of careful strategizing here. If you want the foot soldiers to provide evidence against the generals who were paying and ordering them, you probably want a more compelling argument than “you should do it because it’s the right thing and also I’m going to punch you in the face repeatedly because you broke in to my apartment and bugged my phone” even if that is on its face an entirely reasonable stance.
Ya know, if your boss tells you to break the law, you still don’t have to break the law.
That almost sounds like “I was just following orders” isn’t a viable defense? /s
Hugh Grant’s extra-curricular career as a pap-buster is full of horrifying/morbidly fascinating stories. There’s an irony in the fact that the tabloids themselves are liable for some of the most sensational, squalid and tabloid-ready melodrama you’ve ever heard.
I suppose I must ask, was the legal situation in the U.K. such that all the stalking was basically consequence-free?
Is it still that horrid in 2021?
I know none of it is targeted at me so there is an obvious disconnect, but I can’t even wrap my head around the idea that people out there actually give a shit what Hugh Grant (or anyone) does in their spare time. The fact that there are BILLION dollar empires out there built Soley on celebrity gossip is so bizzare.
I kind of feel the same way. Hugh Grant seems perfectly fine and I get that he was pretty successful (and continues to be), but the fact that the British press went that far for him brings to mind some pretty scary thoughts about what they might have done with even bigger stars, tbh.The amount of money this invasion of his privacy must have cost would have been staggering.
Like Princess Di?
Parasocial relationships are a hell of a drug.
the press cast a pretty wide net and are god awful, the levels of harassment and dirty tricks was crazy even for relatively minor names let alone some seen as a movie star.
of course the worst one was when they decided to hack the phone of a missing teenage girl (Milly Dowler,) who turned out to be dead and they messed with the messages too.
Presumably, they were hoping he’d hire another prostitute, and bingo! Easy headline.
“My God. He’s listening to ‘Jump for my Love’ AGAIN?! He really DOES love that song!”
There he goes, asking for Martine McCutcheon’s home address again…
Nice one. Hey — whatever happened to her? I mean, I even regularly watch the Graham Norton Show and she isn’t ever even on that.
Yeah, the whole celebrity worship culture is created by these types of press. I still don’t know why I should care about celebrities other than for the art they create that I enjoy. It’s horrifying that they both created and cater to this mindset.
Celebrities are people, too